Calculating the price of foster-care panic – in children’s lives and health

Researchers estimate that the foster-care panic in Santa Clara County will lead to anywhere from four to 12 foreseeable premature deaths, and a whole lot of serious illness, that would not have happened had the children been left in their own homes.

Their methodology can be applied to any foster-care panic anywhere, and to states that regularly tear apart families at rates far above the national average. 

KEY POINTS

 ● Researchers have examined scores of studies following millions of foster children around the world, showing the inherent harm of foster care placement. They were able to estimate the percentage of children who will have worse outcomes – including premature death – because they were taken from their families and placed in foster care. They were able to show that the harm to health and the premature deaths are directly attributable to the separation from their families, not anything their families supposedly did to the children beforehand. 

● Then they applied the findings to what is, proportionately, the nation’s worst foster-care panic, the one in Santa Clara County, Calif.  In that county, over the past two years, entries into foster care over the course of a year nearly tripled. Over that time, 399 more children were torn from their families than would have been taken had there been no panic. They applied their findings about harm to health and premature death to those 399 children. 

● Their conclusion: 42 children will suffer long-term illness and/or disability that they would not have suffered had they remained in their own homes. 

● Between four and 12 children will suffer premature death that would not have happened had they remained in their own homes. The researchers emphasize that the death estimate is conservative. 

● Their report, sent to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Saturday, includes seven specific recommendations for making all vulnerable children in the county safer.

 Among the most popular pages on NCCPR’s website is one that summarizes some of the mass of evidence comparing what happens to children in foster care when compared to comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. Over and over, the studies find that in typical cases,  the foster children do worse. 

Most recently updated last year, the page includes this prediction: 

Perhaps most intriguing, these studies suggest it actually may be possible to quantify the harm of a foster-care panic. 

Thanks to these studies, we now have an estimate of how much worse foster children do on key outcomes compared with comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes.  It’s also usually possible to calculate how many more children are taken away during a foster-care panic. 

So it should be possible to estimate how many more children will wind up under arrest, how many more will become pregnant and how many more will be jobless as a result of a foster-care panic. 

Now it’s time to update that page again. Because two researchers, Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendell, founders of Pale Blue. and Family Seeing have done almost exactly that. 

Using some studies cited in NCCPR’s paper, and many more from all over the world, they not only calculated how many more children would suffer, they also calculated how much worse the suffering would be, depending on the type of placement.  The results should come as no surprise.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Health and Mortality Gradient: 
Child Welfare Placement Type, 30-Year Morbidity Trajectory, and Premature Mortality Risk"

For children left in their own homes, seven to 24 percent were likely to suffer adverse health outcomes.  In kinship foster care, by far the least harmful, that figure rose to 18 to 36 percent. For family foster care with strangers, even when it was a single, stable placement, the figure for adverse health outcomes rose to more than half  - 55%, and the proportion who would die prematurely was more than double the proportion among children left in their own homes.  By the time you get to the worst placement of all, institutionalization, a staggering 88% are likely to experience adverse health outcomes – and they are anywhere from four to 5.5 times more likely to die prematurely.  

Again, this is not because of anything that happened before placement – it’s because of placement itself.  So, as the authors emphasize, these are foreseeable outcomes. 

How, then does this apply to Santa Clara County? In the wake of two high-profile child abuse deaths, the Vice President of the County Board of Supervisors, Sylvia Arenas, and the San Jose Mercury News, in particular, reporter Julia Prodis Sulek, rushed to falsely scapegoat efforts to keep families together. That set off what is, proportionately, the worst foster-care panic I’ve seen anywhere in America in at least 40 years. 

In fact, of course, there were tragic child abuse deaths in Santa Clara County long before the county started trying to do more to keep families together.  There was another tragedy in April, - the death of Jaxon Juarez, long after the county was tearing apart families at a fanatical rate. Indeed, the panic may have made the latest tragedy more likely by overloading workers, so they have less time to investigate any case thoroughly. None of that has stopped Arenas or Sulek from continuing to throw gasoline on the fire. Neither has the massive study of more than 3.4 million case records and more than 24,000 child abuse deaths which found that increasing entries into foster care does nothing to decrease such deaths. 

What all this research tells us is that increasing foster care does nothing to save lives, but can, in itself, lead to premature deaths. 

Arenas seems to relish governance by humiliation and demanding that everyone else “reflect” on their behavior. Sulek seems to relish watching Arenas do it. In one story, Sulek wrote about how 

Last summer, after an epic takedown of [top county child welfare officials] during a board meeting, Supervisor Arenas demanded they each write a “letter of reflection” about their leadership failures that led to the child safety crisis.  

But now, Campbell and Wendel have applied their methodology to the Silicon Valley Foster Care Panic.

 Their conclusion: 

Among the 399 children taken because of the panic, 42 will suffer “limiting long-term illness and/or disability” that they would not have suffered had they been left in their own homes. Between four and 12 will die prematurely, who would not have died prematurely had they remained in their own homes. 

The death estimate is conservative. It assumes all 399 additional foster children stayed in the first placement. For each subsequent move, the risk increases.

Source: Kevin Campbell and Elizabeth Wendel, "Santa Clara County Foster Care Surge, 2024-2026

One doesn’t have to stop at Santa Clara County. One can apply the same methodology to the foster-care panic set off by the Miami Herald in 2014, by the Minnesota Star Tribune that same year, by assorted politicians in Maine in 2018 and New Mexico in 2023 (and probably again right now) and so many others over the years, and calculate how much more illness and how many premature deaths those panics caused. 

The methodology also can be applied to states that, even in the absence of a panic, regularly take away children at a rate far above the national average, states like worst-in-the-nation West Virginia, for example.

In Santa Clara County, there’s still a chance to stop the panic and reverse course – perhaps saving some lives, both short-term, by giving workers more time to find children in real danger, and long-term, by preventing some foreseeable premature deaths caused by the trauma of placement. 

That requires three steps: 

● First, of course, stop taking all those children needlessly. But also: 

● Do an in-depth review of every case in which a child is now in foster care, and see how many can be quickly reunited. Then, provide intensive support for the reunited family, because even a short-term removal does children long-term damage, and it takes intensive help to mitigate that harm. 

● Where placement genuinely is essential, make intensive efforts to place children with extended family members and genuinely support those family members. Kinship foster care placements typically are vastly less harmful than any form of stranger-care placement.  As we discussed in our first post about Santa Clara County, had Jaxon Juarez’s grandfather gotten that kind of support, Jaxon might be alive today. 

Now that the price of panic can be so clearly quantified, perhaps the supervisors and the reporters and editors at the Mercury News, and their counterparts across the country, will reflect on that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 12, 2026

Before the news, a word about a big event next week: 

● Every November, on “Adoption Saturday,” we re-post our blog about the obscenity of those mass adoption ceremonies at courthouses all over the country. On May 22 at Noon ET, join Nrrowing The Front Door for a webinar on the topic: 

How Adoption Celebrations Ignore the Destruction of Black and Brown Families 

This webinar highlights how adoption celebrations mask the trauma and pain of family separation. Centering the voices of people with lived experience, panelists will explore how these narratives overlook harm while uplifting adoption as a positive outcome. 

Drawing on organizing and policy expertise, panelists will examine how race, power, and dominant narratives shape who is seen as a 'fit’ family and who is denied family autonomy.

You can register here

Now the news: 

● Darn those pesky peer-reviewed studies – they keep getting in the way of the child welfare establishment’s dogma about poverty and neglect. Here’s another one, from JAMA Pediatrics, showing that the RX Kids cash assistance program is effective in reducing child abuse investigations. As the University of Michigan notes: 

Following the launch of Rx Kids in January 2024, maltreatment investigations among Flint infants in their first six months of life declined from 21.7% to 15.5%. During this same time period, there was an increase in allegations in 21 similar comparison cities. Rx Kids led to a seven-percentage-point decline (a 32% relative reduction) in maltreatment investigations in Flint. 

And from a story about the study from Michigan Advance: 

"These findings, now published in JAMA Pediatrics, underscore the powerful role that economic stability plays in protecting children," said Dr. Mona Hanna, Rx Kids director and associate dean of public health at Michigan State University. 

"By trusting families and investing in them during the earliest, most vulnerable period of life, we are not only improving health outcomes, we are preventing trauma before it starts," she said. 

● The Imprint reports on a lawsuit accusing Washington State of, in effect, abandoning immigrant foster youth to the tender mercies of the Trump Administration. From the story: 

Washington state’s child welfare system is flouting its duty to protect the best interests of immigrant children in their custody, a newly filed lawsuit alleges. And by failing to address immigration-related needs — such as helping youth apply for needed legal protections — the state leaves them at risk of deportation and blocks their ability to receive public benefits, the suit contends. … 

[A]ccording to court filings, Washington doesn’t screen its foster youth for immigration issues or provide information on how to become documented or work toward citizenship, including the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) program. 

● The problems in family policing often begin at state child abuse “hotlines.” The lessons from this excellent new report from the New York City Family Policy Project don’t just apply to New York. 

● The Community Insite podcast talks to family defender and activist Angela Burton. As the title explains: She almost led NYC's Biggest Child Welfare Agency. Instead, she's reimagining it from the outside. 

● Since 1980, family police agencies have been legally required to make “reasonable efforts” to prevent foster care placement and “reasonable efforts” to reunify families. Judges were supposed to enforce the requirement. But if the judge doesn’t check the box claiming reasonable efforts were made, the state or county can’t get federal reimbursement for part of the costs of foster care in that case. So judges put away their gavels, haul out the rubber-stamps and claim that reasonable efforts were made even when they don’t believe it themselves. In a 2005 study, judges admitted to routinely lying and checking the box on the form when they didn’t think it was true. Well, not always, of course. But it sure can come close:

 Another study of reasonable efforts, examining 348 cases, was published in 2024. For that one, the researchers were supposed to answer this question: 

How are hearing quality, information provided to the court before the initial hearing, and case characteristics related to judges’ findings of reasonable efforts to prevent removal? 

But they couldn’t – because no judge ever said no! Not one judge. Not one case. 

The study noted one other interesting pattern: Homelessness was a greater barrier to reunification than physical abuse. 

● Occasionally, an agency’s failure to make reasonable efforts is so egregious that a judge can’t ignore it. As in this case, reported by Fox17 in Tennessee: 

A 6-year-old with autism from Cannon County was removed from his family by the Department of Children’s Services and placed in foster care. What happened next, a juvenile judge would later call a “comprehensive failure of the system.” 

Matthew Floyd was moved 22 times in just 100 days. … “All he wanted was to come home,” his mother said. “He wanted Mom and Daddy. He was scared. They wouldn’t bring him back.” … 

The judge found DCS had a continuing duty to make reasonable efforts to make it possible for Matthew to return home. “Such efforts were not met as it relates to Matthew,” the judge wrote. 

● Thirteen states have passed "reasonable childhood independence" laws, in an effort to stop family police agencies from harassing families and traumatizing children because parents did things like let their children play outside or walk to the store by themselves. Now a bill has been introduced at the federal level. And while it's not an endorsement of any particular legislation, the movement got a boost on the comics pages this week.

● There’s an adage in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Oregon’s family police agency illustrates a corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency gives you data, check it twice!” Oregon is a case in point, but it’s not unique. On the NCCPR Blog: The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense 

● There’s an adage in law: Hard cases make bad law. There should be a corollary: Horror stories make horrible laws. A horror story prompted Connecticut legislators to pass a bill that would bar anyone listed on the state’s child abuse registry from ever homeschooling their children. But in Connecticut, as in most states, one can be blacklisted this way if a caseworker simply checks a box on a form stating her or his “reasonable cause to believe” there was abuse, or far more often, “neglect” – which often means poverty. In the Hartford Courant, James Mason, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, explains why Gov. Ned Lamont should veto the bill, and the opposition to it is bipartisan. 

● She reportedly “fell in love” with her foster baby – but only until she found out the state wouldn’t pay for childcare. I have a blog post about the story profiling this saintly foster mom, and the double standards it reveals. 

● Foster care apologists sometimes claim poverty can’t be confused with neglect because some nations with stronger social safety nets also take away a lot of children. As I discussed in this column for Youth Today, that’s misleading for many reasons, including the fact that another factor in needless removal, racism, knows no borders. The Guardian reports on a case in point, from Denmark, in which a court found that the Danish equivalent of a “psych eval” was biased. From the story: 

Keira Alexandra Kronvold’s daughter Zammi was taken away from her when she was two hours old and placed in foster care in November 2024 after Kronvold was subjected to so-called FKU (parental competence) psychometric tests. At the time she was told that the test was to see if she was “civilised enough.” 

She still doesn’t have her child back, though. The Danish familie politi simply administered a different test to get the conclusion they wanted. 

Of course, the U.S. child welfare establishment has been saying “FKU” to families for decades.

She reportedly “fell in love” with her foster baby – but only until she found out the state wouldn’t pay for childcare

Indiana State Capitol (Photo by Warren LeMay)

The foster mother at the center of this story probably does an excellent job caring for children. She made a reasonable financial calculation concerning her real family. The point of this post is not to criticize her or her decision. It is to note the difference between how she regards that real family and the foster children she does and does not take in, and to highlight the usual general “child welfare” system hypocrisy. So I won’t name her or link to the story in question. Since this was essentially your typical story about a saintly foster mother, when I get to her story toward the end of this post, I’ll just call her “Saintly Foster Mom.” 

UPDATE, MAY 14: And compare Saintly Foster Mom to the aunt in this story from USA Today, and consider what it really means to "fall in love" with a child. 

For a short time, Indiana had a commendable, robust childcare subsidy program for low-income families – well, mostly low-income families. One group of middle-class or even affluent families not only was in on it, they were at the front of the line: foster parents.  After all, you can’t very well expect foster parents who proclaim their enormous love for the children in their care and who already get a monthly payment from the state to actually pay for their foster children’s childcare, can you? 

Indiana funded this with $1 billion in federal aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the aid expired, the state stopped giving out new vouchers and set up a waitlist. 

Since then, lawmakers have bent over backwards to accommodate middle-class foster parents. They passed a law setting aside 200 vouchers just for foster parents. And now that the state is moving money from other agencies to make more vouchers available, foster parents get to cut to the head of the line. 

In other words, children who might have been taken away because of “lack of supervision” charges, because their parents couldn’t afford childcare, are placed with middle-class foster parents – who get childcare for the same children, paid for by the state. 

We don’t know how many children in Indiana are taken away due, in whole or in part, to lack of supervision. But we do know that Indiana tears apart families at a rate nearly triple the national average, higher than all but five other states. And see the box below for what else we know about Indiana’s status as an extreme outlier for child removal, and its confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Keep in mind that Indiana foster parents already get a minimum of about $28-per-day-per-child. The story about Saintly Foster Mom points out that this covers about 69% of the average cost of childcare. On the other hand, that $28-per-day-per-child is tax-free. There’s also a $200 initial clothing allowance, a “personal allowance” of up to $300 per year, and annual $50 checks for birthday and holiday presents. After all, you wouldn’t want a foster parent to have to pay for their foster child’s own birthday present, would you? 

So now, consider how the story about Saintly Foster Mom begins: 

[Saintly Foster Mom] has welcomed nearly 40 children into her home in the past decade. Some were long-term foster placements, others were emergency or short-term stays. She and her husband focus on giving these kids a sense of stability and safety. 

In her home, there are no iPads or Netflix accounts. Instead, there are stacks of books, like "Goodnight Moon," used to bridge developmental gaps for children who arrive only knowing a few words. To [SFM], fostering is a lifelong ministry. 

“I'm passionate about children and just focusing on one child at a time, just helping whatever child can come into our home for the time period that's given,” said [SFM], who fostered four infants and toddlers for long-term stays. 

But [Saintly Foster Mom], who owns a small business with her husband and has three biological children, said her calling is at a standstill. She recently made the difficult decision to turn down an infant she had already fallen in love with while providing short-term care. The reason was the lack of a child care voucher. 

No one should begrudge this foster parent her decision. It’s entirely reasonable to consider the financial consequences of taking in a foster child for yourself and your own children. Doing so does not mean a foster parent is “only in it for the money.” But please, news organizations, spare us the treacle about foster parents “falling in love” with children – when they’ll only take them if they can get a childcare subsidy over and above their monthly pay.  And just once, news organizations, how about asking lawmakers why middle-class foster parents get to skip to the head of the line ahead of low-income birth families. 

THE CONTEXT: FAMILY POLICING IN INDIANA

● Nationwide, 37% of children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.  In Indiana, it’s 58%.  Nationwide, 53% of Black children will have to endure this trauma. In Indiana, it’s 79% - the highest rate in America. 

● In any given year, among all children, Indiana takes them from their homes at a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

● When going up against this family police juggernaut, families often are almost literally defense-less – because their lawyers often have so little time and so many clients. Many Indiana counties want to keep it that way. One in five actually turns down federal funds to improve representation for parents and also for children. One county court administrator explained that county’s refusal this way: “[T]he system we have works well.” So families often have no one who will, for example, get them a childcare subsidy so they can get back the children taken due to “lack of supervision.”

None of this is because Indiana is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the national average.  In fact, in Indiana in 2025, 86% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care, their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty-two percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of any form of drug or alcohol abuse. As many children were taken away because of “inadequate housing” than because of physical and sexual abuse combined.

The Oregon family police agency fudges the figures at children’s expense

They’re misleading us about the rate of entries into foster care …

 Oregon is one of those states operating under a settlement resulting from one of those pointless McLawsuits that Marcia Lowry brings all over the country. (How pointless? The organization she now runs, A Better Childhood, is the fourth from which she has brought these lawsuits over the past 50+ years. All three of the others have turned their backs on her approach.) 

The settlement requires the state family police agency, the Department of Human Services, to submit “progress reports.” This is the most recent.   

DHS took advantage of the opportunity to engage in a whole lot of disingenuous figure fudging in an area the settlement doesn’t care about (because Marcia Lowry almost never cares about it): reducing entries into foster care. 

Let's start with the basics. In FFY 2025, Oregon took away children 2,391 times. That’s actually 227 more times than children were taken in Oregon in 2024. But what measure should be used to compare Oregon to the rest of the country? Oregon DHS's method is so ludicrous that if torturing logic were a war crime, they'd be hauled before an international tribunal.

After claiming that Oregon took away 2.7 of every thousand children in 2024, the progress report says: 

Oregon has a lower rate of foster care entry than the national median. Nationally, the median foster care entry rate in 2021 was 3.0. 

How are they misleading us? Let us count the ways: 

● The data for the national median are from 2021, while DHS compares it to Oregon data from 2024. Since nationwide entries have been declining slowly but steadily since 2021, odds are the median is lower now. And, by the way, as noted above, data now are available for 2025. 

● National median is an odd choice for comparison. If the DHS figures are correct, it would mean only that, compared to total child population, more states take proportionately more children than Oregon than take proportionately fewer. 

Source: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database

But comparisons typically are to the national average (the mean rather than the median). Why doesn’t DHS do that? Oh, I don’t know, maybe because when you do an apples-to-apples comparison involving the same year, 2025, Oregon took away children at a rate more than 25% above the national average, even when comparing entries to total child population (which, as is discussed below, is the wrong comparison anyway). 

And, by the way: While DHS says it took away 2.7 children for every thousand in 2024, in 2025 it rose to 2.89 per thousand.

But even that isn’t the worst of it. 

● DHS is using the wrong denominator, thereby hiding the full extent to which Oregon remains an outlier. DHS compares entries only to the total child population. But the far more valid measure is to compare entries to the impoverished child population. When you do that for every state, the national average is 16 children taken per thousand impoverished children. The figure for Oregon is 21.7 – thirty-five percent higher. 

By the way, that’s also the 23^rd highest rate of removal in the country, so it’s above the mean and the median. 

Sources: Entries: Administration for Children and Families AFCARS database
Impoverished children: Census Bureau Current Population Survey (3 year average).

So, DHS misleads by comparing entries only to the total child population (and misleads about even that). That comparison is b.s. for one simple reason: Family police agencies don’t target the total child population – they target the impoverished child population. Can you find a middle-class family caught in the family police net? Occasionally. Can you find such a child placed in foster care? Even less often.

 As we explain in the annual NCCPR Rate-of-Removal Index: 

We could have simply compared the number of children removed to a state’s total child population. But then all the states with high rates of removal and high child poverty rates would complain that this was unfair because we didn’t consider a risk factor for actual abuse (not to mention the factor most often confused with “neglect”) – poverty. 

In addition, since family policing agencies almost never take children from affluent families, using the total child population would allow affluent states that still take large numbers of children from impoverished neighborhoods to camouflage this fact. 

Based on per-capita Income, Oregon is America’s 18^th most affluent state. So Oregon DHS’s selective use of data hides what it does to its impoverished families by diverting our attention to what it doesn’t do to affluent families. And then it further hides the result by comparing only to the median instead of to the mean. 

… and their data on abuse in foster care are meaningless 

The report also contains a bunch of gobbledygook about the rate of abuse in Oregon foster care. The report acknowledges that their rate appears high compared to a target number that is based on the rate in other states. DHS is right in claiming such a comparison isn’t really valid, because definitions of abuse and neglect vary so widely. But it doesn’t matter. Because the entire measure is such a farce that DHS should be ashamed to put forward the figures it does, and Marcia Lowry should be ashamed of using official agency measures of abuse in foster care in this, or any other, settlement. 

That’s because, in every state, official measures of abuse in foster care are ludicrously low. For example, in 2024, 6,675 children spent at least one day in Oregon foster care. DHS claims that, of that number, only 114 were abused by a foster parent or group home or institution staff – that’s 1.7%.  That means Oregon DHS wants us to believe that if you gathered 100 former foster youth in a room and asked them: “How many of you were abused in foster care in 2024?” only two would raise their hands. 

Yet, study after study after study, including at least one specific to Oregon, find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate in group homes and institutions is even higher. These studies use conservative methodology, often imposing limits on things like which placements or which perpetrators are counted.

(Oregon DHS may try to defend itself by saying theirs is a single-year estimate, while the studies may cover a longer time period. But the average length of stay in Oregon foster care is 18 to 24 months, so even if one doubles the amount of abuse Oregon admits to, as in the graphic below, that figure is vastly below the reality.)  

  1.                                   2.
1.=% Oregon admits to in 2024, x2
2.=LOW END national average estimate from indepdendent studies

The reason for the difference in findings is obvious: When agencies investigate abuse in foster care, they are, in effect, investigating themselves. That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the case file. 

DHS and the governor even tried to get the Oregon Legislature to pass a law that would make this worse – it would have raised the threshold before awful things done to children in group homes and institutions would count as “abuse.” 

The very fact that people in the Oregon family police agency have to know they are putting forward numbers that are probably between one-tenth and one-twentieth or less the real rate of abuse in foster care should be cause to question their credibility and even their fitness for their jobs. (Unfortunately, however, every state essentially lies this way about the real rate of abuse in foster care.) 

If DHS, or Marcia Lowry, really wanted to know how much abuse there is in foster care, they would do what those independent scholars do: Pull together a random sample of former foster youth  - and ask them. 

In fact, Marcia really does know. In 2010, she told the Philadelphia Daily News: 

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way, whether it is child-on-child or not.” 

And that’s only one kind of abuse. 

Marcia also commissioned an actual study of abuse in foster care as part of another of her McLawsuit. The study found vastly more abuse than officially reported.

Why we need to whack the weeds … 

Here’s why going so deep into the weeds is important. If people get the misimpression that Oregon DHS is removing children at a rate below the national average, it tees up the next inevitable false claim. It will happen right after the next tragedy involving the death of a child “known to the system.” Someone (and I think we all know who it’s most likely to be) will rush to claim that this “raises questions” about whether “the pendulum has swung too far” toward keeping families together. 

That is the biggest lie of all. 

Yes, Oregon has made some real progress. Tearing apart families at a rate “only” 35% above the national average is a big improvement over where things were many years ago. But it’s hard to give DHS the credit it's due, when it keeps trying to claim credit it doesn’t deserve. 

Meanwhile, maybe it’s time to add a corollary to a famous adage in journalism that goes: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” Here’s the corollary: “If a ‘child welfare’ agency hands you data, check it twice!”

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending May 5, 2026

● Cruddy journalism by the San Jose Mercury News and grandstanding by a prominent politician have been so effective that it appears that some people in Santa Clara County, Calif. think there were no child abuse deaths back when the county was taking away far more children. It shouldn’t be necessary, but we set the record straight in this post. 

● The Boston Globe has an excellent story about abuse in Massachusetts group homes and institutions – in a state that tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. The Anchorage Daily News has a follow-up to a similar expose in that state, which tears apart families at an even higher rate. But, as noted in this post to the blog, neither story mentions that salient fact, and lawmakers in neither state seem prepared to face up to it. That means nothing is going to change. 

● Ashley Cross, executive director of HOPE585 in Rochester, New York, writes in The Imprint about how child abuse prevention is not about pinwheels and fearmongering. She writes: 

When families lack stable housing, enough food or access to child care, the margin for error disappears. One missed shift, one unexpected expense, one sick day can spiral into a situation that brings them to the attention of the system. … 

Families living in poverty are far more likely to come to the attention of child protective services. Not because they care less about their children, but because they are navigating impossible trade-offs every day. Do you go to work and risk leaving your child home sick, or stay home and risk losing the job that pays your rent? Those are not parenting failures. They are resource failures. 

● Even as the Trump Administration pushes the use of what amounts to computerized racial profiling (a.k.a. “predictive analytics”) in child welfare, the title of this British study says it all: “Beware the algorithm: a scoping review of predictive analytics in children’s social care.” 

● And you read it here first: The latest data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting system are now public. There seems to be little change on average nationally in the number of children taken from their homes or the number in foster care on any given day, but there’s bad news in several states, particularly Missouri and Maryland. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Former foster youth are suing the Washington State family police agency seeking compensation for what one lawyer describes as “some of the worst abuse. Just absolute horrific conditions, and unfortunately an all-too-common textbook example of a house of horrors.” The family police agency has been trying to hide the evidence by withholding records. The Center Square reports that the State Supreme Court has ruled that the agency is going to have to come clean. 

● From WTVJ Miami: 

A Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue lieutenant and his wife were arrested for allegedly locking their 12-year-old adopted daughter for years inside a room at their Coral Springs home, authorities said. … According to arrest reports, the couple is accused of subjecting the child to "ongoing mental and physical abuse" over a period of about three years.

How to NOT fix abuse in group homes and institutions in 8 easy steps. Lessons from Massachusetts and elsewhere

Steps already completed are checked: 

_x_Take away children at a rate far higher than the national average, creating an artificial “shortage” of foster homes. 

_x_Due to “shortage,” use group homes and institutions, the worst form of “care,” at a rate that’s also well above the national average, creating conditions for rampant abuse of children in group homes. 

_x_Newspaper does an excellent job exposing rampant abuse of children in group homes but does not mention the high rate of removal. 

_x_People most responsible for, over decades, creating the climate of fear and demonization of families leading to the state’s high rate of removal, are quoted extensively condemning the abuse, while taking no responsibility for creating those conditions. 

__Lawmakers express shock and outrage and promise sweeping reforms and/or hearings (all duly noted in the traditional follow-up story). 

__Reforms consist entirely of increasing inspections, and screening and training, the same promises made the last time this sort of abuse was exposed, and the time before, and the time before that. This time, they might throw in closing the “age of consent” loophole. 

__Attention fades, and the state continues to take away children at a rate well above the national average. The new training, screening and inspections change nothing. 

__The entire cycle repeats. 

That’s the Massachusetts version. Something remarkably similar is playing out in Alaska.

 Of course, there is one way to break this cycle …

The latest AFCARS data are just out: No change nationally, but some bad news from a few states

CORRECTION, MAY 6: This post has been changed to reflect that I erred in overstating the increase in entries into care in Missouri.

The federal government has released its annual update to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), a database that attempts to track, among other things, entries into foster care, exits, and the number of children trapped in foster care on Sept. 30 of each year – known as the “snapshot number.” The data are labeled preliminary, as they are every year when first released. Though it's rare, in a few states revised numbers can be a few hundred higher or lower.

Nationally, when compared to FFY 2024, there is virtually no change in the entry or snapshot numbers. Either there was a slight increase or a slight decrease. We don’t know which, because this year, for the first time since 2022, Wyoming and Washington State finally got their acts together and submitted data. They were not counted in 2023 or 2024. So whether entries slightly increased or slightly decreased probably depends largely on what the actual numbers for those states were in 2024. The only thing we can be sure of is the “slightly” part. There may, however, have been a real, and disturbing, decline of roughly 10,000 in the number of children exiting foster care. 

But, of course, the national figure hides wide variation among states. 

Here’s some of the bad news: 

They're cranking up the foster-care-to-prison pipeline in Missouri

There was more than a 12% a nearly 19%  a nearly 19% increase in entries in Missouri, a state that already had a high rate of removal. The increase may be the largest of any state in 2025. It's probably is due to a big change for the worse in leadership. When Darrell Missey ran the state child welfare agency, he tried to reduce entries into care. He was pushed out and replaced by Sara Smith, who has made her fanatical take-the-child-and-run approach abundantly clear. The increase in entries in 2025 wiped out the gains Missey made in 2024. 

There also was a disappointing 7.5% increase in entries in Texas; but entries there still are well below the level before groundbreaking reform legislation took effect. 

And there was a nearly 17% increase in entries in Maryland, probably the result of the usual wretched response to high-profile tragedies. The fact that one of those tragedies involved a foster youth who committed suicide after being taken away and dumped in a hotel doesn’t seem to have given anyone in Maryland government second thoughts about taking away more children. That, unfortunately, is typical. 

And then there’s Kansas. I’m holding off saying anything about this one, because in that state, there’s either been a giant increase in the number of children placed in foster care – or a giant data glitch. I don't know which. The state says it's the latter and the federal figures involve double-counting. I have inquiries out to federal officials, and I will update this post when I find out more.

And in case anyone in these states actually thinks this is something to celebrate, here’s one more reminder of what the research tells us about the multiple studies showing that, in typical cases, children placed in foster care typically fare worse in later life than comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. And here’s one more reminder of all those studies showing high rates of abuse in foster care itself. 

And the good news 

There are several states that have shown commendable decreases in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love – but I’m not going to highlight them here. That’s because as soon as a state or county becomes known for dedicating itself to sparing children the enormous inherent trauma of placement, and the high risk of abuse in foster care, it’s like painting a target on the backs of the system’s leaders. 

Those wedded to the failed take-the-child-and-run approach that has destroyed so many children’s lives bide their time until the next child abuse tragedy involving a child “known to the system” in that community. Since no jurisdiction can prevent every such tragedy, no matter how few – or how many – children they take, there’s always going to be one. (Indeed, a massive study finds no relationship between how many children are taken away and child abuse deaths.) 

Then those who are sincere but mistaken, those who are just grandstanding politicians, and those who, I suspect, deep down, just don’t want poor people, especially poor people of color, to be allowed to raise their children, come out of the woodwork, fingers wagging, to claim that the tragedy supposedly shows that the system is placing family preservation ahead of child safety. Case in point: Santa Clara County. Journalists who, at best, believe this because it sounds right and it fits their own stereotypes about parents who lose children to the system or, at worst, are just Pulitzer-sniffing, rush to amplify the false claims and shut out dissent. Case in point: Santa Clara County. 

So while anyone, including those who will misuse the data, is free to check the AFCARS database and do their own comparisons, I’m not inclined to assist in that process.